Lizzie Skurnick enjoys making up new words—her popular column “That Should Be a Word” in the New York Times Magazine is proof. Now there’s a book, That Should Be a Word: A Language Lover’s Guide to Choregasms, Povertunity, Brattling, and 250 Other Much-Needed Terms for the Modern World that’s “a compendium of 244 of Skurnick’s wittiest wordplays—more than half of them new—arranged in ingenious diagrams detailing their interrelationships.”

Jen Pinkowski, Mental Floss: “They’re witty, hilarious, and—crucially—super useful.”

Below are examples of Skurnick’s work pertinent to Minding Therapy. As I don’t have access to the new book, they’re taken from various sources—including the publisher’s description, Pinterest, and Skurnick’s website:

• Fidgital—excessively checking one’s devices.
• Martyrmony—staying married out of duty.
• Carbiter—one who asserts that someone else cannot be hungry.
• Brattle—to discuss one’s children at great length.
• Bangst-—the profound financial anxiety of a post-recession society.
• Flagony—guilt over an unanswered email.
• Personallergy—an individual who derives their sense of self from a health condition.
• Dronanist—person who likes to hear himself talk.
• Flipocrite—one who openly justifies doing what one can’t abide in others.
• Wordition—being stuck around a person who won’t stop talking.
• Palbatross—the disliked friend of a friend.
• Prepidatious—overreadiness in the face of anxiety.
• Shoverdose—to binge-watch a TV series.
• Flabsolution—self-forgiveness for weight gain.
• Chumbrage—irritation on a friend’s behalf.
• Saddict—one who thrives on misery.
• Duncertain—unsure if one has completed a task.

And, finally, a reader’s (“stern200”) submission to Skurnick’s column in 2012:  PSYCHOLOGUST —advice from therapists that’s a lot of hot air.